Green Monster For Sale

Like my fantasy garage doesn't have enough cool cars in it, it turns out that Art Arfons' Green Monster, yes, that Green Monster, is for sale on eBay. Back in the 1960s, the land speed record went from around 300 MPH to around 600 MPH in what seemed like a matter of months, and the two combatants could have been further apart in personality or approach.

The two men involved are now legends. One is Craig Breedlove. Young, good looking, Californian and with a remarkable talent for working with what would now be considered "sponsors". Art Arfons was a junk dealer from Ohio. He looked like the guy down at the machine shop that you'd trust with porting and polishing the heads on your new Hemi. He was also able to buy a jet engine surplus from the U.S. Air Force, rebuild it with only occasional help form one buddy of his, and then mount it in the car you see here: The Green Monster.

The engine in question was a General Electric J-79. The same engine used in the B-58 Hustled mach three bomber and the F-104 Starfighter. At the time, a civilian getting their hands on an engine like this was akin to someone today getting their hands on some nuclear triggers. The Air Force was not pleased when they go word that Arfons had a General Electric J-79 at his junkyard in Ohio.

And Arfons, in turn, was not pleased to be hassled by a couple of guys in blue suits demanding that he return "their" property. He showed them the bill of sale, chased them off of his property, and got back to work. When Finished, and I am not making this up, he chained the J-79 to two trees in his back yard, and fired it up.

By the time he could cut the fuel flow, he had blown out windows for hundreds of yards down range and reduced his neighbor's chicken coup to smoking twigs. Art was highly apologetic to the Akron fire department.

You think that's then end of the crazy stories? Then you haven't been around land speed record racing much. And the particular car for sale here is a featured player in one of the best. The car here is the one that was rebuilt form the pieces of Arfons' Green Monster he crashed in 1966.

While traveling in excess of 575 miles per hour, something, either a wheel bearing or a wheel, I've never heard a clear explanation, came apart. At those speeds, which is 90% the cruising speed of a Boeing 747, the resulting crash was titanic. The chase car, driven by Art's semi-estranged brother Walt, drove towards the biggest chunk, figuring that's where Art was. They literally couldn't find him.

Walt was literally seen wandering around the moonscape of the Bonneville Slat Flats crying out "ART?! ... ART?! ... ART?!" towards various chunks of debris. Art was there, relatively OK, banged up, shaken up, and still strapped in, but the debris field was like something out of a NASA rocket launch gone wrong. They found parts of the Green Monster four MILES away from the main crash site.

Think about that for a second. Bring up a Google map of where your sitting right now if you have to, and then visualize how far away four frickin' miles is. When things go wrong on The Salt, they go very, very wrong. Arfons was lucky to walk away with his life. Did this knock any sense into him? No. He was playing around with wheeled vehicles till the day he died in 2007. The last I heard he was building and selling a line of turbine powered motorized bar stools.

No, I'm not making that up either.

Source: AutoBlog